Beware the Internet Scroungers

 

I was looking through my log files last night and I found a few hits from a site I had never seen before. Out of curiosity I looked at the site and found out some charleton had copied my Curved Metal Tutorial for Photoshop word-for-word onto a forum! He even had the audacity to link to the images on my site!

I was furious so I contacted the moderators who removed the thread. It made me realise though that I had not set Apache to prevent this (stealing images in this way is known as hotlinking) from happening.

Hotlink prevention means you tell the Apache webserver to check the domain of every image request. You specify one or more safe domains - if the domain is not regarded as safe Apache serves a different image (one telling them to stop stealing!). Preventing hotlinking stops frauds stealing your bandwidth and content.

If you need to do likewise I've added some example code here.

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